Editorial Comment
After having been villified for several weeks in the Wellesley
News and after having been denied the opportunity to defend
myself therein, I now resort to publication of this broadside
series, in an effort to let the record reflect more than my detractors'
point of view. Issue No. 1 consists solely of my defense of myself,
which the Wellesley News refused to print. Subsequent issues
will deal with other aspects of the controversy surrounding my
teaching of The Secret Relationship Between
Blacks and Jews.
The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews (Historical
Research Department, Nation of Islam, 1991) is an excellent study
of Jewish involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade and African
slavery. It demonstrates that Jews were very much in the mainstream
of European society as far as the trade in African human beings
was concerned. While numerous other studies have dealt with the
role played by Christians, by African collaborators and by Muslims
(especially in relation to the slave trade to Asia), there has
hitherto been no effort to synthesize available information on
Jewish involvement. This is perhaps surprising, since Jewish domination
of the other major Transatlantic slave trade has received adequate
Jewish coverage -- I refer here to "white slavery,"
the international prostitution of (mainly) Jewish women, by Jewish
entrepreneurs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
(See Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice).
The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, using
primarily Jewish sources, shows that Jews were fully involved
in every aspect of the African slave trade. They were heavily
invested in the Dutch West India Company, a multinational corporation
(to use modern terminology) specializing in all aspects of the
slave trade. They were major slave importers and dealers in places
such as Curaçao, Brazil and Barbados. In their Surinamese
town of Jew Savannah and elsewhere, they owned substantial numbers
of slaves and were zealous participants in European wars waged
against slave runaways and maroons. Like their Christian counterparts,
they engaged in the full gamut of atrocities visited upon the
unfortunate Africans, from whipping to dismembering to rape and
murder. In an incident not related in The Secret Relationship,
J.G. Stedman, a British veteran of Dutch wars against African
maroons in Suriname, detailed the story of the African maroon
leader Jolly Coeur, who as a young boy was a horrified witness
to the rape of his mother by a Jewish slaveowner, one Schults.
As an adult Jolly Coeur avenged his mother's rape by flaying Schults,
using his skin to keep his powder dry and employing the slaveowner's
head to play bowls on the beach. (J.G. Stedman, Narrative of
a Five Year's Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam).
For the United States, The Secret Relationship cites U.S.
census figures to show that Jews, on a per capita basis, often
owned more slaves than non-Jews. They owned slave ships that plied
the Atlantic and actually owned all the rum distilleries in Newport,
R.I. (Rum, distilled from slave-produced molasses, was an important
item in the slave trade.)
Jewish abolitionists were few and far between, and the exceptional
Jews who opposed slavery were sometimes subjected to the opprobrium
of their co-religionists. There is no Jewish counterpart in the
United States to the organized Christian abolitionism of the Quakers,
Methodists, Baptists and others. Jewish writer Jonathan Kaufman
in Broken Alliance admits that "The Jews who first
came to America in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth
centuries were heirs to a conservative political tradition that
tended to embrace the status quo...." Slavery, of course,
was a major part of that status quo.
The Larger Context
The full force of Jewish fury has been unleashed against The
Secret Relationship. The book has been denounced as "anti-Semitic"
and on a par with the greatest racist works of all time. At Wellesley
College, the Wellesley News has called on students to come
forward and testify against it, so that it may be forcibly removed
from my syllabus. Wellesley's Academic Council rewarded with polite
and prolonged applause the chair of Africana Studies, when, in
heart wrenching emotional terms, he, too, denounced the book as
"anti-Semitic."
For an explanation of the frenetic response to this quite normal
scholarly work, one must look at the history of African American/
Jewish relations in the twentieth century. For much of this century,
Jews have been a prominent element in the liberal wing of white
North America. According to Kaufman, this switch to seeming liberalism
(very different from the slavery and earlier post-slavery eras),
was facilitated by the development of the Reform Movement in U.S.
Judaism in the late nineteenth century, by Jewish involvement
in communism and socialism, and by the pursuit of an enlightened
Jewish self-interest. In the words of Kaufman, the Jewish "struggle
for equality and fair treatment was linked to the struggles of
blacks for greater opportunity. It was not a struggle of equals;
Jews did not consider their plight equal to that of blacks. But
they recognized in the black struggle for rights elements that
could benefit them and conditions with which they could sympathize."
Accordingly, several rich and powerful Jews, among them prominent
leaders of the U.S. Zionist movement, co-founded, led and financed
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
(The NAACP, founded in 1909, got its first African-American chairperson
only in 1975, after the death of chairman Kivie Kaplan, a Boston
Jew. The NAACP's highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, is named after
one of its early Jewish leaders, Joel Spingarn.) Jewish influence
in African American affairs climaxed in the Civil Rights era of
the 1950's and 1960's when, according to Kaufman, three-quarters
of the funding raised by the three major Civil Rights organizations
(the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of
Racial Equality and Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership
Conference), came from Jewish sources. Jewish influence in the
movement was personified by Stanley Levison, one of King's two
closest advisors (the other being Andrew Young). Levison drafted
King's speeches, handled his finances and served as his chief
strategist.
This coalition of unequals came under severe stress after the
mid-1960's, when Black Power came to town, emphasizing self-reliance
and African American control over their own organizations.
Academia
Jewish influence in African American affairs was reflected also
in the realm of scholarship. Jewish scholars came to occupy a
powerful position within the area of African American Studies.
Names such as Melville Herskovits, Herbert Aptheker, August Meier
and a host of others came to be considered by many as the leading
authorities on African American history and culture. (The fact
that African Americans, unlike Jews, did not own any major publishing
companies, doubtless contributed to this state of affairs).
With Black Power came the rise of Black Studies, a greater influx
of African Americans into the academic community and a desire
for greater control over scholarly interpretations of their own
experience. The rise of Afrocentrism and the establishment of
African American publishing houses are recent developments in
that ongoing struggle.
Jewish Offensive
By the late 1960's the momentum for African American struggle
had definitely moved away from the traditional Civil Rights organizations
(in which Jews exercised great influence) to the newer groups
and individuals favoring a more self-reliant approach to African
American struggle. This had serious consequences for Jewish participation
in African American affairs. While the powerful NAACP Legal Defense
Fund continued under its long-standing Jewish leader, Jack Greenberg,
the expulsion of all whites from SNCC and CORE inevitably removed
direct Jewish influence from these bodies.
These African American assertions of independence did not sit
well with Jews who had grown accustomed to overlordship of the
Civil Rights movement, not to mention great influence in the economic
life of African American communities. While pockets of Jewish
liberalism remained, the dominant Jewish posture was now characterized
by the demise of benevolent paternalism and its replacement by
an aggressive hostility to continuing African American progress.
The new policy brought some impressive Jewish victories, as Jews
leveraged off of their great influence within the United States
polity, to thwart the rising ambitions of African American folk.
In 1968 Jews defeated the efforts of African Americans in Brooklyn,
New York to control the education of their own children, in the
Ocean Hill-Brownsville affair. In 1977 the major Jewish organizations
intruded themselves as "friends of the court" into the
Bakke case, to defeat affirmative action programs for African
Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and Native Americans. Jews
became the major opponents of Jesse Jackson in his two presidential
bids. After Minister Louis Farrakhan defended himself against
Jewish charges of being an African American Hitler, they raised
a hue and cry of "anti-Semitism." The major Jewish publication,
Commentary, hid behind the first amendment to allow the
bigot Arthur Jensen to spew forth his garbage on the supposed
genetic inferiority of African Americans. This pseudo-scientific
racism reached new heights in 1990 when Jewish City College (New
York) professor Michael Levin became the new standard bearer for
white supremacy. "On average," he declared, "blacks
are significantly less intelligent than whites" (New York
Times, April 20, 1990). When Nelson Mandela visited New York shortly
thereafter, some Jewish elements threatened to disrupt his appearances.
Ted Koppel and other Jews on ABC's Nightline program (staged at
the very same City College), hinted broadly to Mandela that he
had better succumb to Jewish pressure or risk losing U.S. support.
Mandela had to explain to the Jews that "Your enemies"
(in this case Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization)
"are not my enemies."
There were many more assaults on African American interests, but
perhaps the most memorable was the offensive against Andrew Young.
Young was one of the most sacred icons of the African American
integrationist, traditionally pro-Jewish establishment. Yet Jewish
pressure on President Jimmy Carter cost him his job as U.S. ambassador
to the United Nations. His "anti-Semitic" indiscretion
consisted of a meeting with a PLO representative. The result was
a 1979 summit meeting of the African American political integrationist
establishment. Everybody from Coretta Scott King to Jesse Jackson
to the NAACP's Benjamin Hooks was there. The Congressional Black
Caucus, women's organizations, fraternities and sororities and
everyone else deplored the treatment of Andrew Young and issued
a "Declaration of Independence" against external control
of African American organizations.
The Secret Relationship and Wellesley College
The Jewish scholar Nathan Glazer sought to provide intellectual
justification for this onslaught. In his Affirmative Discrimination
(1975) he turned history upside down to argue that white ethnic
groups (such as Jews) who had arrived "post-1880" (as
if no Jews had arrived before 1880), "were not particularly
involved in the enslavement of the Negro or the creation of the
Jim Crow pattern in the South...or the near extermination of the
American Indian.... There is little reason for them to feel that
they should bear the burden of redressing a past in which they
had no or little part...." B'nai Brith repeated these falsehoods
in its brief for the Bakke case.
This falsification of history is now corrected by The Secret
Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which documents Jewish
involvement, not only in African slavery but in the extermination
of the Native Americans as well. The predominant Jewish response
has been, all too predictably, to denounce the book and all who
use it (myself included), as "anti-Semitic." "Anti-Semitism,"
once presumably the anguished cry of an oppressed people, has
become, for the privileged and powerful U.S. Jewish leadership
and their unthinking Negro stooges, a bludgeon to subdue dissent,
stifle discussion, deprive African Americans of a living and perpetuate
historical lies.
"Anti-Semitism" has also become a clever smoke screen
for a burgeoning Jewish intolerance of truly Stalinist proportions.
Last year my esteemed Wellesley College colleague Mary Lefkowitz,
Andrew Mellon professor (the same one who did not know that Herodotus
had referred to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; the
same one who recently insulted our Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial
speaker, Dr. Yosef ben-Jochannon, in the college chapel), launched
into a sudden and unprovoked attack on my "Africans in Antiquity"
course. She became displeased at the suggestion that Africans
had pioneered civilization and influenced Ancient Greece. She
took the unprecedented step of intriguing with the dean of the
college to rewrite the description of my course in the preliminary
college catalog, without my knowledge or consent. She also attacked
the course in the conservative Jewish-owned New Republic
and in the Chronicle of Higher Education, where she described
Afrocentrism as an irrational development. (Neither publication
allowed me to respond). Several years earlier the resident Jewish
Studies expert in Wellesley's Religion department had written
the Curriculum Committee in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent
me from teaching this course at all. On February 21, 1993, two
days after my return from a lecture engagement at Gettysburg College,
Lefkowitz despatched a memo to contacts there warning them against
Afrocentric scholars in general and Dr. ben-Jochannon in particular.
"It seems to me," she wrote, "that the promulgation
on college campuses of this type of 'information' is a very great
danger to our subject, since it is often delivered to students
in contexts where no competent historian of the ancient world
is welcome or able to be present." And now I learn from the
Wellesley News that Hillel students not registered in my African
American survey course sat in, unknown to me, in order to monitor
my references to The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and
Jews.
This type of mindless intolerance is clearly not acceptable. Despite
their recent victories, Jews have nothing to gain in the long
run from picking fights with an aroused and conscious African
American population. They must realize that slavery has ended.
It ended some time ago. And even though some handkerchief heads
will always be among us, the cozy paternalism of the Civil Rights
era has run its course. It is not too late to reverse the current
trends, but any rapprochement between African Americans and Jews
will have to be predicated on mutual respect. And mutual respect
will entail reparations from both Jew and Gentile for four centuries
of unrequited toil. Nathan Glazer argued that "Compensation
for the past is a dangerous principle," but it is unlikely
that he found fault with the billions in reparations paid by Germany
to the Jewish state of Israel. The day of Africa's reparations
must come.
Begining of Broadside #1
TOP OF PAGE
Editorial Comment
Barely a week after the publication of The
Jewish Onslaught, Wellesley's new president, Diana Chapman
Walsh, has taken the extraordinary step of issuing a formal denunciation
of the new book. In a December 9, 1993 statement disseminated
to all students, faculty, staff, alumnae and "friends of
the college" she declares as follows - "We are profoundly
disturbed and saddened by Professor Martin's new book because
it gratuitously attacks individuals and groups at Wellesley College
through innuendo and the application of racial and religious stereotype."
Due to President Walsh's newness on campus, it can plausibly be
surmised that she has relied heavily on the opinions of her advisors.
The baleful influence of these shadowy figures is plainly evident
in the palpable one-sidedness of the presidential proclamation,
in its reliance on sweeping derogatory generalizations and in
its inability to support its assertions with documentation of
any sort. In all these ways and more the presidential statement
is reflective of official and quasi-official approaches of the
last twelve months.
Our new president has squandered a golden opportunity to bring
fresh leadership and even-handed tolerance to the present controversy.
The Jewish Onslaught was published as a response to the
unprincipled attacks, defamatory statements, assaults on my livelihood
and physical threats directed against me for several months. These
emanated principally from the Jewish community and its agents
and were triggered by my classroom use of a work detailing Jewish
involvement in the African slave trade. In The Jewish Onslaught
I sought to put my subjective situation into the context of deteriorating
Black-Jewish relations of recent decades. I also attempted to
evaluate the tactics used against me in the context of the well-documented
dirty tricks that the Jewish groups have used against Andrew Young,
Jesse Jackson, David Dinkins, Minister Louis Farrakhan, Len Jeffries,
Black parents in Ocean Hill-Brownsville (Brooklyn) and any number
of Euro-American individuals and organizations.
The Jewish Onslaught is a book of analysis supported by
normal scholarly documentation. There is not a single "stereotype"
or generalization in it that is not buttressed by evidence, either
from my personal experience of the last year or from the historical
record. I challenge President Walsh to move from her broad derogatory
generalizations to specific instances to prove otherwise.
President Walsh, like many of the Jewish spokespersons, has a
problem with my "recurrent" and allegedly "gratuitous"
utilization of "racial or religious identification of individuals...."
This is her way of saying that Black people are not allowed to
respond to Jews as Jews. Even after being attacked primarily by
the Hillel Foundation, American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation
League, American Jewish Congress, Jewish Community Relations Council
and every Jewish newspaper and spokesperson for miles around,
I am supposed to maintain the fiction that the onslaught against
me is ethnically and religiously indeterminate.
A recent article in Black Books Bulletin mentions over
twenty books on Black-Jewish relations in the personal library
of its author. The author is aware of only two books by Blacks
on the subject. If President Walsh (and the Jewish community)
are to have their way, then this will forever remain a one-way
discourse. I therefore ask again, as I asked in The Jewish
Onslaught, "What makes Jews so special? By what dispensation
in Adam's will do they enjoy monopolistic privileges over a debate
that concerns Blacks as well as Jews? Who has placed them beyond
the reach of scholarly enquiry and ethnic identification?"
President Walsh claims that The Jewish Onslaught "violates
the basic principles" of, among other things, the "norms
of civil discourse." Yet, in her zeal to uncover "innuendo[es]"
in my work she seems to have missed the blatant lack of civility
in the many articles attacking me. Is she not aware of Professor
Marcellus Andrews' Wellesley News reference to me as a
"racist Pied Piper?" Did no one show her his description
of Wellesley's Black women as "intellectually weak and morally
lazy?" Did Mary Lefkowitz, Mellon Professor in the Humanities,
neglect to send President Walsh a complimentary copy of her article
in Measure (No. 118, September/October 1993), wherein she
maliciously and scurrilously alleged that I called a student "a
white fucking bitch?" Lefkowitz alleged further that "The
young woman fell down as a result of his onslaught and Martin
bent over to continue his rage at her." Did President Walsh
not see, in her reading of The Jewish Onslaught, the text
of a racist cartoon by a Wellesley alumna in the Boston Jewish
Times? The cartoonist designated Black women as "Ms.
Washington" (no different than the "Hymietown"
remark that Jews claimed to be so scandalized by) and seemed to
suggest that Black students be taught from the works of segregationists,
Ku Kluxers and pseudo-scientific racists. Did President Walsh
not read the Jewish hate mail reproduced in The Jewish Onslaught
? "I hate niggers to my very bone marrow," ran a typical
sentence. "Not all Jews debate apes. Some of us want them
all to die." I have been a veritable oasis of civility in
the present debate.
I agree with Justice Holmes, as quoted by President Walsh - "The
best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted
in the competition of the market." The Jewish onslaught has
consistently striven to stifle the "competition of the market"
by its defamatory rantings and its demands for my dismissal. The
present presidential proclamation regrettably ranges itself alongside
this ignoble campaign.
But "the competition of the market" has yet managed
to assert itself, as can be seen in the steadily shifting positions
of the onslaught. From an initial denial that Jews had any role
in African slavery at all, there slowly emerged a reluctant admission
of minor and peripheral involvement. As the debate intensified
and the Jewish denial of the undeniable threatened to expose its
adherents to ridicule, the Washington Post (first among
major newspapers, to the best of my knowledge), was finally permitted
to admit the full extent of Jewish culpability. In a carefully
staged (and not at all pro-Black) article of October 17, 1993
the deniers of Jewish involvement in the African holocaust were
shown to be as wrong as they could be.
The present controversy demands honest dialogue, not crude attempts
at demonization. If President Walsh desires to extricate herself
from the hole into which she has fallen, let her collaborate with
me (and with interested students), on the convening at Wellesley
College of a serious scholarly conference on the role of Jews
in the African slave trade. She can invite Skip Gates, Cornel
West and anyone else acceptable to the Jewish establishment to
argue their case. I will nominate an equal number of scholars
to defend the perspective which I endorse. The spirit of Justice
Holmes will be lifted.
As my mother used to say, "One hand can't clap." As
Ray Charles was wont to soulfully sing, "It takes two to
tango."
Begining of Broadside #2
TOP OF PAGE
The Jewish attack on Black progress reached
Wellesley College in 1993, when more Jewish organizations than
you could shake a stick at issued a call for the dismissal of
Dr. Tony Martin from his tenured professorship at the elite women's
college. His crime? - including readings on Jewish involvement
in the African slave trade in an African American history course.
With rare insight and biting wit, Martin replies to his detractors
and offers a historian's analysis of the escalating Jewish onslaught
against Black people.
Best Book of The Year
The Jewish Onslaught was named "Best Book of the
Year, 1994" at the annual Black Literary Awards held in Hampton,
Virginia. The awards are sponsored by UB and US Communications
Systems.
Jewish Onslaught is #1 Bestseller
The Jewish Onslaught spent several months in 1994 at the top of
the Black book industry's bestseller list. The list is compiled
monthly by Your Black Books Guide, most widely circulated
publication of the Black Books Movement. The book is the fastest-selling
title published by The Majority Press to date (though not the
biggest seller in absolute terms). From the Wellesley College
Bookstore to after-lecture sales around the United States, The
Jewish Onslaught has been a massive seller everywhere.
"Occasionally one reads a monograph
that establishes a genre of literature, or at least makes the
reader feel that he or she is in the presence of a new literary
event. On reading Tony Martin's The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches
from the Wellesley Battlefront, one senses the incredible
power of the writer to defend himself against those who would
limit his freedom of speech while expanding theirs. This is a
polemic of the highest order and it might be considered the best
such example of an African answering critics since David Walker's
preemptive Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.
"...it is only by reading The Jewish Onslaught that
one can fully appreciate the brilliant mind of Tony Martin. His
defense of his right to free speech and academic freedom will
certainly become one of the best known documents in the history
of African people's intellectual self defense."
From The Journal of Black Studies, XXV, 1, Sept. 1994.
"Tony Martin's book, The Jewish
Onslaught, should only be read by two groups of persons--those
who want to understand the politics of teaching Afrocentricity
at either the college or university level, and those who wish
to understand the intellectual issues at stake between Blacks
and Jews....
"Martin describes the reaction of various Jewish organizations,
most notably Hillel and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai
B'rith, on the use of the Nation of Islam's book, The
Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, in his class
on African American history at Wellesley. In what can only be
described as an onslaught, Jewish organizations waged a campaign
of intimidation that eclipses the Leonard Jeffries case at City
University of New York. Martin details circumstances that should
be viewed as ominous by all Black scholars in that news organizations,
particularly newspapers, have excoriated him and provided only
rare opportunities for rebuttal and/or op-ed pieces.
"What is paradoxical about the Jewish onslaught to Martin's
book, the Jeffries case and other attacks on Afrocentricity, is
that some of these same organizations and individuals claim to
be avid defenders of the First Amendment. Mary
Lefkowitz, in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher
Education (January 19, 1994), called for a holy war against
"false theories in the classroom." Her hysterical article
all but advocated a repeal of the First Amendment when it comes
to dealing with what she perceives as the false claims of Afrocentricity.
"Martin's chapter entitled 'Afrocentricity' deals directly
with the reasons why such vitriol is being heaped on Afrocentricity,
and is probably the most important chapter in the book. His analysis
of Martin Bernal's Black Athena series is a brilliant analysis
of the politics of Jewish organizations' pressures to suppress
scholarly inquiry into African history.
"Professor Martin at long last deals with the Henry Gates/Cornel West attacks on Afrocentricity.
Many Blacks have talked about, but few have written anything on,
the rise of the ubiquitous Henry "Skip" Gates and Cornel
West as a function of their being used in denouncing Afrocentricity.
Martin provides a solid analysis of the historical use of Blacks
by whites to discredit original Black thought deemed unacceptable
by non-Blacks....
"I compare The Jewish Onslaught to the classic third
chapter of DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk
entitled "Of Mr. Booker T.
Washington and Others." That essay dealt with a specific
issue concerning Black leadership, but is timeless in terms of
its application to current events in the Diaspora. I believe that
Martin has written a book that years from now will be considered
a classic in terms of understanding the historical relationships
between Blacks and Jews. It is simply a must reading on a controversial
subject that needs greater airing than some of the more timid
political attempts of recent years."
From The Voice of Black Studies, XVIII, 5, Winter 1994.
"Wellesley, Massachusetts, is a peaceful
New England town, home of Wellesley College--a prestigious women's
institution that is among the most academically acclaimed of this
nation's small liberal arts colleges. It hardly seems like the
setting for a confrontation in the 'Black-Jewish conflict.' And
yet, as the title of this book suggests, that is precisely what
took place there beginning in early 1993.
"At the center of the controversy is Tony Martin, a Black
scholar whose academic achievement and reputation would seem to
make him a natural choice for an institution such as Wellesley....He
is widely acknowledged as the world's foremost authority on the
life and work of Marcus Garvey and is the author of eleven books.
In addition to his duties at Wellesley he has been a visiting
professor at the University of Minnesota, Brandeis University,
Brown University, and The Colorado College.
"Then, one day in January, Martin's class on African American
History was monitored for a single period by three officers of
the Wellesley Hillel Club. The visit was prompted when Jewish
students noticed that a book published by the Nation of Islam,
entitled, The Secret Relationship Between
Blacks and Jews, was on a reading list for the class.
Based on that single visit, and that single fact, the campus Hillel
Club launched an attack on Professor Martin for disseminating
what its spokeswomen characterize as "hate literature."
The Secret Relationship, they say, is an anti-Semitic work.
"This accusation is made on the grounds that The Secret
Relationship documents Jewish involvement in the African slave
trade (using predominantly Jewish historical sources to do so)....
"Martin shows that he has been the victim of a vicious slander
campaign by those who use a Jewish identity demagogically, insisting
that because they are Jews all others must uncritically accept
their denunciation of Martin, or anyone else.
"Exposing this reality is Martin's purpose in writing The
Jewish Onslaught, and it seems to this reader that he adequately
makes his case....
"The perception that Jews are somehow better than other groups
of whites in their relationship to Blacks...is simply false. Jewish
establishment support to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s
flowed from its own material interest in helping to further open
American society. That was achieved, and it helped to establish
a substantial 'Black middle class' of professionals and small
proprietors. But an even larger proportion of Jews were able to
successfully 'integrate' themselves into the more privileged strata
of U.S. society. And this 'Jewish integration' makes it quite
outmoded to consider that Jews continue to be the victims of oppression
in the U.S., in any sense of that term.
"But these two myths--of Jews as an oppressed people and
a special 'friend' of Black liberation--nevertheless maintain
a tenacious hold. They give a particular credibility to Jewish
spokespeople's denunciations of Black leaders for 'anti-Semitism.'
This has, in fact, become a standard, and extremely effective,
way to discredit Black activists.
"The question of Jewish involvement in the African slave
trade represents a particularly imposing threat to the idea of
an historic 'Black/Jewish friendship.' That is why a major campaign
has been launched to make sure that this subject remains out of
bounds. Once the accusation of anti-Semitism is raised, any reasoned
debate or discussion becomes impossible....
"Finally, those Black intellectuals who do speak out against
'Black anti-Semitism' tend to echo the white power structure's
sweeping denunciations of honest inquiry as well as real prejudice.
It seems reasonable to believe that this attitude is shaped by
the desire to maintain relatively privileged positions in academic
or political life. And this can only be done by pleasing the white
establishment which remains master in these areas.
"...it would be wrong to simply dismiss Martin's call on
Jewish religious and cultural institutions today to renounce [the
Hamitic Myth, the Talmudic notion that Africans were recipients
of a Biblical curse.] If prominent Jewish scholars and religious
institutions were to explicitly reject the Hamitic myth, that
fact could play a positive role in opening up new possibilities
for dialogue and overcoming the genuine anti-Black racism that
exists among Jews....
"[The Jewish Onslaught ] is compelling reading. I would recommend
it to anyone who wants to better understand what creates the antagonism
between Blacks and Jews, not only in Crown Heights but in Academia
as well...."
Prepared for Third World Viewpoint (forthcoming).
"...you don't have to say or do anything
specifically about the Jews for them to attack. All you have to
do, like our great ancestor Marcus Garvey, is dare to have independent
thought....
"A good example of this is the vicious attack on Tony Martin,
the renowned Garvey biographer and teacher who was terrorized
by these people non-stop...after using The
Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews in one of
his courses.
"His experiences, recalled in the Jewish Onslaught, are an
indictment on the despicable behavior of the Jews...."
From Global Africa Pocket News (London), I,5, May 1994.
"Truth is a hard task master, and this
was to come home forcefully to Tony Martin....An expert on Marcus
Garvey, he has written, compiled or edited eleven books and is
highly regarded in academic and intellectual circles....
"Tony Martin has been forced to delve into the relationship
between the Jews and Blacks and, in the process, he has distilled
a work that is informative, fascinating and one which will heighten
the consciousness of Black people everywhere.
"The role of Jews in the African slave trade foreshadowed,
too, the manipulative role of the Jews in the American Civil Rights
Movement of the Sixties....
"In The Jewish Onslaught, one is struck by the sensitivity
of the Jews to their role in the affairs of Black people. And,
this against the background of academic work put out for decades
about the role other groups played.
"These groups ranged from whites to Black Africans. Where
the conclusions drawn were in doubt, these were challenged, but
certainly not with the vitriol and the paranoia the Jewish community
seem to have exhibited in reaction to Black historians putting
out academic work from their own perspective, and which deals
with the Jewish role. This is a good read."
From the Sunday Gleaner
(Jamaica), Feb. 6, 1994.
"By his dedication to Garvey scholarship...Martin
has inherited the struggle to keep Garvey's ideas alive and to
continue the struggle against his historical enemies, Blacks and
Whites, who are still in the forefront of destroying the progress
of African people.
"Martin's recent book, The Jewish Onslaught, is vitally
important because it is the first published report that chronicles
what happens when one dares to speak the truth--as one has researched
and studied it--about Jews being among the criminals who had leading
roles in the buying and selling of African people and in the genocide
of at least 100 million of them during the holocaust of enslavement....
"The Jewish Onslaught offers frightening insight into
the psychological pogrom that Jewish organizations conduct to
instill fear, to break the mind and spirit, castrate the character
and to kill the career of anyone whose ideas they deem to not
be kosher."
From New York Amsterdam News, Feb. 12 & 19, 1994.
"The increase in your salary for next
year does not include a merit award....the recent degradation
of your scholarship...warrant[s] a statement of disapproval and
concern....
"...the lack of intellectual balance in The Jewish Onslaught,
the polemic you wrote and continue to affirm as legitimate scholarship,
has been communicated to you repeatedly."
From annual salary letter, Diana Chapman Walsh to Tony Martin,
June 8, 1994.
Begining of Broadside #3
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